Stay organized when taking something apart

Taking things apart -- such as a kitchen faucet -- is usually the easy part. It's putting them back together where most of us have trouble. In fact, we would guess that many garages harbor a box of parts from something that never got successfully reassembled again.

That's why it pays to remember the right order.

A good way to organize your small pieces is to lay them out in a line in the order that you disassemble.

Take a large sheet of paper and fold it accordion-style. When it's lying on a table, you can set each piece into a fold and the pieces stay separated.

Just reverse the order when you reassemble. Hopefully, there will be no parts left over.